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Intergalactic Jesus

Jerry Coyne: Darwinian Christians, 9 May 2002

Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship between Science and Religion 
by Michael Ruse.
Cambridge, 242 pp., £16.95, December 2001, 0 521 63144 0
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... crucifixions. ‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that,’ George Orwell wrote (in a quite different context). ‘No ordinary man could be such a fool.’ Despite such gymnastics, Ruse’s attempt at a reconciliation ultimately fails – not surprisingly, given that it requires us to accept a version of Darwinism so ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: Dining Out, 4 June 1998

... that he intends to appoint one of his acolytes to be governor instead of giving ‘Steady Eddie’ George a further term and letting the markets know it sooner rather than later?15 July 1997. To St Paul’s for the memorial service for Lord Chief Justice Peter Taylor. The first and best address is given by Humphrey Potts, a lifelong friend of Peter’s from ...

Great Tradition

D.G. Wright, 20 October 1983

Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears 
by Geoffrey Pearson.
Macmillan, 243 pp., £15, July 1983, 0 333 23399 9
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... as well as much hostility to working-class culture and amusements – voiced, for example, by George Orwell, T.S. Eliot and the Scrutiny group gathered round F.R. Leavis. Alarm concerning the pernicious influence of Hollywood on working-class youth was matched by fear of football rowdyism both on and off the pitch. In 1936 the Football Association ...

Rosa with Mimi

Edward Timms, 4 June 1987

Rosa Luxemburg: A Life 
by Elzbieta Ettinger.
Harrap, 286 pp., £10.95, April 1987, 0 245 54539 5
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... of imprisonment and the firing-squad. Empathy, as Bernard Crick pointed out in his biography of George Orwell, is no substitute for evidence. The assumption that one can enter so completely into another person’s mind may endow a scholarly biography with the undertones of a romantic novelette: ‘The fear that she had destroyed Jogiches haunted ...

Fat and Fretful

John Bayley, 18 April 1996

Foreign Country: The Life of L.P. Hartley 
by Adrian Wright.
Deutsch, 304 pp., £17.99, March 1996, 0 233 98976 5
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... he bewailed the way things were going, he hated modern England. In the late Forties, by when George Orwell was confiding to friends that he ‘loved the past, hated the present and dreaded the future’, Hartley, a most un-Orwellian figure, was routinely and predictably saying the same. Satire was the last thing he could do well. Facial Justice, a ...

Full of Teeth

Patricia Beer, 20 July 1995

The Life of Graham Greene. Vol. II: 1939-55 
by Norman Sherry.
Cape, 562 pp., £20, September 1994, 0 224 02772 7
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Graham Greene: Three Lives 
by Anthony Mockler.
Hunter Mackay, 256 pp., £14.95, July 1994, 0 947907 01 7
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Graham Greene: Friend and Brother 
by Leopoldo Duran.
HarperCollins, 352 pp., £20, September 1994, 0 00 627660 1
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Graham Greene: The Man Within 
by Michael Shelden.
Minerva, 567 pp., £5.99, June 1995, 0 7493 1997 6
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... Constable.’ In 1991 Greene died and Michael Shelden published his authorised biography of George Orwell. Both these events gave Shelden greater freedom to write a book about Greene. There could no longer be thunderous telegrams from Antibes or anywhere else, and now that the albatross of one subject had dropped off his neck he had time, space and ...

Not a Single Year’s Peace

Thant Myint-U: Burma’s Problems, 21 November 2019

... from British India. Some also campaigned against economic exploitation. ‘If we are honest,’ George Orwell wrote, ‘it is true that the British are robbing and pilfering Burma quite shamelessly.’ Firms in London and Glasgow grew fat on profits from the export of Burmese rice, oil and timber while ordinary villagers sank into poverty. In 1937 ...

Brief Encounters

Andrew O’Hagan: Gielgud and Redgrave, 5 August 2004

Gielgud's Letters 
edited by Richard Mangan.
Weidenfeld, 564 pp., £20, March 2004, 0 297 82989 0
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Secret Dreams: A Biography of Michael Redgrave 
by Alan Strachan.
Weidenfeld, 484 pp., £25, April 2004, 0 297 60764 2
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... has a very grand tradition in England, and though the subject failed to catch the attention of George Orwell, it might have been a nice thing if it had, given its place in England’s emotional life at every level and in every class. Orwell was an old Etonian, so he knew all about that, but he also spent a certain ...

Ex-King Coal

Arthur Marwick, 31 March 1988

The History of the British Coal Industry. Vol. IV, 1913-1946: The Political Economy of Decline 
by Barry Supple.
Oxford, 733 pp., £50, December 1987, 9780198282945
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... work mining is the most arduous and uncomfortable and the most dangerous. ‘All of us,’ wrote George Orwell in 1937, ‘owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.’ Herbert Smith, President of the ...

Boss of the Plains

D.A.N. Jones, 19 May 1983

The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations 
by Paul Fussell.
Oxford, 284 pp., £9.95, January 1983, 0 19 503102 4
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... reprinted in 1983.) An American professor of English literature, with a strong admiration for George Orwell and Kingsley Amis, Fussell uses his nation’s Handbook in their fierce, blustering way, to challenge the conceptions of trendy-left and radical-chic folk, explaining to them that a boy who tries to obey Scout Laws, whatever else he does, will ...

Normal People

Sheila Fitzpatrick: SovietSpeak, 25 May 2006

Everything Was For Ever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation 
by Alexei Yurchak.
Princeton, 331 pp., £15.95, December 2005, 0 691 12117 6
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... of all sorts of hitherto inaccessible work, from the religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev to George Orwell and Nabokov, is described by Yurchak as primarily a ‘discursive deconstruction’ of the late Soviet system. He in turn wants to look at discourse – both the formal discourse of newspaper editorials and politicians’ speeches and the way ...

Ticket to Milford Haven

David Edgar: Shaw’s Surprises, 21 September 2006

Bernard Shaw: A Life 
by A.M. Gibbs.
Florida, 554 pp., £30.50, December 2005, 0 8130 2859 0
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... course, well known that many Western intellectuals – including such leading literary figures as George Orwell, Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch – were strongly attracted to Communism.’ Holroyd is exasperated by Shaw’s delusions and alarmed by where they take him: ‘Our question is not to kill or not to kill,’ he quotes Shaw as writing in ...

Bourgeois Reveries

Julian Bell: Farmer Eliot, 3 February 2011

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper 
by Alexandra Harris.
Thames and Hudson, 320 pp., £19.95, October 2010, 978 0 500 25171 3
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... to the avowedly nostalgic John Betjeman. Likewise, we get no more than a brief sidelong glimpse of George Orwell. So be it. Let’s say that Harris’s concern is with a certain strand of artistic production, rather than with an overarching historical narrative. She has chosen Romantic Moderns as her title because she believes that in all her favourite ...

Diary

Clancy Sigal: Among the Draft-Dodgers, 9 October 2008

... Quakers, pacifist vicars, street people, students, the vegetarians and sandal-wearers detested by George Orwell, even retired military officers. I favoured getting AWOLs out to the provinces, where they seemed more comfortable than in metropolitan London. Deserters saw themselves as, and were, the ‘niggers’ of the antiwar movement, which by and large ...

Why didn’t he commit suicide?

Frank Kermode: Reviewing T.S. Eliot, 4 November 2004

T.S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews 
by Jewel Spears Brooker.
Cambridge, 644 pp., £80, May 2004, 0 521 38277 7
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... Wilson barely remains as polite as it was now good manners to be when discussing Eliot. In England George Orwell echoed Wilson’s opinion. That the illness of a generation was a suitable subject for poetry was not denied, but Eliot’s remedy seemed preposterous. Such rejections were of course more or less exactly what Eliot understood by heresy, and so ...

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